CHAPTER FOUR
“His real name isn’t Layle Smith, of course,” said the master torturer. “I named him Layle after a brother of mine who had died in the wars against Yclau, and I told the boy that he could choose a new last name for himself.” The master looked up from where he had been trimming his nails with his dagger and held his nails up to the light contemplatively. “I always thought that his choice showed a surprising lack of imagination.”
Elsdon, shivering on the floor under the blanket that had been his only defense against the cold on the previous night – the master had taken away his clothes – made no reply.
“Other than that, he was the most imaginative apprentice I ever trained – the most skilled as well. Am I right in remembering that Seekers aren’t allowed to use instruments of torture themselves? That they have to accomplish their torture by way of their guards?” He waited till Elsdon nodded, then said, “A pity. The boy was a genius with the whip; I’ve never seen anyone who could control a line like he could. I had one prisoner who fainted dead away just from watching Layle whip a post. . . . By the end of his first year, I was allowing the boy to work independently. He could break half the prisoners I let him try his hand at. By the end of the second year, he was breaking three-quarters of his prisoners. He was especially good with female prisoners. I hear it’s boys these days?”
It took Elsdon a moment to untangle the meaning of this sentence; then he replied coldly, “He has a male love-mate, if that’s what you mean.”
“So that particular rumor is true. Odd. He could never manage that when he was a boy – lovemaking, I mean. It just didn’t seem to be in his nature. I felt sorry for the boy, I’ll admit. He tried so hard and failed every time. . . . I remember the night I spiked his dinner with silver pot-herb.” He noticed Elsdon’s expression and smiled. “It’s part of the standard training for our apprentices. At the right dosage, silver loosens the tongue, making the person confess to his deepest desires. If the apprentice has any secret thoughts of betraying the King, such plots should reveal themselves under silver.” The master tossed his dagger in the air and caught it easily as it fell. “That whole night, from dusk till dawn, Layle talked about the love-mate he planned to have one day. How he would care for her, how he would protect her, how he would lay everything he had at her feet and give her the full depths of his heart. . . . That was when I first guessed that he was an idealist and knew that I should have strangled him on the night of his racking.”
The words were spoken without passion; no strong emotion appeared in the master’s face. Elsdon struggled his way up onto one elbow. Ignoring the pain stabbing his torso and legs, he asked, “Why do you hate Mr. Smith?”
“Hate him?” The master raised his eyebrows at Elsdon, his eyes widened with surprise. “My dear, my entire problem is that I loved him too much. I knew he was a peril, and I didn’t act against him, as I should have.”
“He was your love-mate, then?” Elsdon felt a heaviness in his chest and tried to convince himself that it came from jealousy.
The master gave a bark of laughter. “Love-mate? I’d sooner mate with a shark. Layle Smith is dangerous, my dear; if you haven’t figured that out by now, trust me on this. No, if I needed a word to describe what Layle was to me, I’d have to say ‘son.’ He was my heir, the apprentice every master dreams of, the boy who would take all that I taught him and go on to accomplish great deeds. And one day I awoke to find that Layle had taken all that I’d taught him and had fled to the Eternal Dungeon with it.”
His voice was as bitter as death. Elsdon lowered himself slowly to the floor again, saying breathlessly, “So why do you hate the Eternal Dungeon?”
The master glanced at the door, where the sound of the guards chatting could be heard faintly. Then he said carefully, “You Seekers consider the King’s Torturers to be barbarians, I’ve heard. Tell me, under what circumstances do you torture your prisoners?”
“Only if they break the Co—” He caught himself in time, and added quickly, “The rules of the dungeon. We’re not permitted to torture them otherwise.”
“Under what rules can they be tortured?”
“If they fail to show respect to us – the same respect that we’re required to show toward them. And if they lie to us.”
“So,” said the master, sliding his fingers over the flat of his blade, “if you ask them whether they committed the crime they’re accused to have committed, and they say no, then you can torture them if you think they’re lying.”
After a small space of silence, Elsdon said, “We usually don’t take so direct a route. Our job isn’t merely to obtain confessions—”
“—it’s to make the criminals regret having committed their crimes. Yes.” The master glanced again at the door before saying, “Suppose . . . This is only a supposing, but suppose that I took it into my head to overturn the governance of a certain exalted personage, in the hopes of bringing an end to this overly lengthy war between my kingdom and your queendom. Would I be an evil man?”
Elsdon played with the straw under his fingers for a moment before saying, “I suppose in the eyes of many Vovimians—”
“But in my own eyes and the eyes of other men around the world, perhaps not? Now, suppose that the Hidden Dungeon was run under the same rules as the Eternal Dungeon. My torturer’s job would be, not only to obtain a confession, but to convince me that I did wrong. After several weeks of searching he succeeded in his task; due to my ‘rebirth’ I received a pardon and was released into freedom. I then spent the rest of my life admonishing all the young people who came under my influence against the evils of trying to revolt against that exalted personage. Wouldn’t that be a wondrous accomplishment on the part of my torturer?”
Elsdon was silent. The straw had covered his fingers with muck. He dropped it and pulled his blanket closer to his body.
“When your master was a boy,” the torturer said, looking down upon Elsdon with a grave expression, “I told him what I tell all my apprentices: Never forget that what we do is evil. It is not nice, it is not pretty, and it is not at all admirable. It is necessary in order to keep the King’s peace. But never see our work as anything other than the barbarism it is. Never idealize it.”
The master’s grip had tightened upon his dagger hilt. The muscles in his arms stood out in relief, and his eyes were dark under the lamplight from the corridor. He said, in a voice barely above a whisper, “He listened to me. He appeared to understand and agree. And then he fled to the Eternal Dungeon – to that place where torturers go beyond the necessary breaking of the body and take delight in breaking men’s souls, forcing prisoners to hold beliefs that tear asunder their consciences. He went to that place, and he didn’t merely follow orders there. He began to give orders, to make it even more likely that the prisoners there would have their souls bent and bloodied and reshaped out of all recognition. He taught others, like yourself, how to commit the greatest atrocities mankind has ever known, and he taught you to call what you did goodness.” The master’s fist upon the dagger began to shake. “And you ask me why I believe I should have strangled him when he was fifteen. I would have spared him this shamelessness – I would have spared the world from what he has become.”
Elsdon said nothing; the pain in his chest had robbed him of all speech. He ducked his head and stared down at the filthy straw, its golden sheen hidden by the brown muck lying upon it. Then he felt a shadow fall over him, and he jerked his head up.
The master was on one knee beside him. In his hand was the dagger, and Elsdon felt his breath stop abruptly. But the master merely said in a soft voice, “You Seekers take what is ugly and place a varnish of beauty upon it, making it seem as though the ugly is beautiful. We who work in the Hidden Dungeon have never shown such dishonesty; we say plainly that what we do is ugly. Necessary, but ugly. Do you still believe that you are the masters, and we are nothing more than ignorant apprentices?”
Elsdon looked down at the straw, let the slime there coat his fingers
for a moment, then shook his head.
He felt the master touch his shoulder softly. Then the Vovimian rose and said in a brisk voice, “Well, enough chit-chat. How was your night?”
Elsdon turned his eyes upward to the man looming over him. Swallowing through the hardness in his throat, he said, “The music was a pleasant surprise, but I found the screaming to be disharmonious with it. Though the periodic cursing had a certain primitive charm to it.”
The master stared at him a moment, then gave a roar of laughter. “A prisoner who jests with his torturer. It’s been a long time since I’ve had one of those.”
Elsdon gathered himself up onto his elbow again and said, “Truly, I’m curious about the music. It seemed to be coming through the wall behind me; do you have a music hall there?”
He felt his stomach clench as he saw the master’s eyes grow merrier. He could guess that the torturer knew the reason for his question. Rather than turn aside the question, though, the master said, “That music? It was the King’s irony.”
Elsdon stared blankly at him, and the master laughed again. “Tell me, young Seeker: Where do you think would be an appropriate place for a prison reform conference?”
Elsdon rolled onto his back, gritting his teeth against the lash of pain that accompanied any movement of his body now. He stared at the wall, saying, “In the Hidden Dungeon?”
“Well, a space aways from it. The lesser prison we’re housed in at the moment is part of a complex of buildings next to the royal forests where hunting takes place. The prison conference is being held in one of the other buildings. The King thought it would be amusing to hold such a conference within a cannonball’s shot of the very dungeon that the delegates would most like to reform.”
Elsdon said nothing. He continued to stare at the wall, his breath rapid.
“You could try screaming,” the torturer suggested. “Or shouting your name, or the name of the Yclau delegate. I’m told that these walls are so thick that the sound of a hundred delegates singing at the top of their lungs comes through the walls as nothing more than a faint bit of music – and vice versa. But you can try if you like.”
After a moment, Elsdon shook his head. If the screams he had heard during the week he had been imprisoned here hadn’t sent every delegate at the conference running to investigate, no sound that he could produce would accomplish any rescue. He found himself wondering whether the master had been instructed to tell him about the conference’s location, as an additional form of torture.
“Is Vovim taking part in the conference?” he asked, his gaze still on the wall.
“Oh, yes,” said the master. “We don’t have a formal delegation, but our King is there today, telling the conference members about the King’s mercy.”
“It must be a short talk.”
The words were out of his mouth before he could recall them. He was not particularly surprised when his statement was followed by a kick in the side. He rolled over toward the wall, moaning, as the master said calmly, “You want to watch that your wit doesn’t lead you down the wrong paths, my dear. The King’s mercy is a term for one of our customs here in the dungeon. In cases where a high-ranked prisoner confesses to treason, but the King decides to show him mercy, he is spared the shame of a public trial and public execution. Instead, his torturer offers him a dagger. The prisoner accepts the dagger with the phrase, ‘I regret.’ Note the wording. The phrase is short for ‘I regret my deed,’ of course, but we don’t require the prisoner to say that. If he wants to think of himself as saying, ‘I regret having been caught,’ or ‘I regret that I can’t murder the lot of you,’ then he’s permitted such thoughts. That’s the difference between the Hidden Dungeon and the Eternal Dungeon, you see: we break prisoners, but we leave them with the dignity of keeping their consciences intact.”
“And then the prisoner kills himself with the dagger.” Elsdon gasped the words as he rolled round to face the master. He had only just found the strength to hold back his moans.
“A quick death, far preferable to the shame he’d undergo in public. I don’t suppose your High Seeker told you about that. He’s as accomplished as his predecessors at editing the truth to make the King’s Torturers appear to be villains.” The master glanced down at Elsdon. “Well, my dear, you have a talent for making me do the talking rather than doing the talking yourself. I suspect that you have a certain skill as a Seeker. Get up, please.”
The blade in his voice left no room for argument. Elsdon pushed aside the blanket, pulled himself into a sitting position, and tried to rise. A moment later he was sitting again, trying to muffle his screams into his knees.
The master appeared unimpressed. “My dear, you were only half a day in the leg-locks, and I spent most of that time answering your questions rather than increasing the pressure. You’re not crippled.” He reached down, grabbed Elsdon’s hand, and pulled him to his feet.
Elsdon’s screams finally subsided to sobbing. He pushed his face against the wall, trying to adjust himself to the pain radiating up from his legs. He knew as well as the master did that he was not crippled. He had spent the previous morning calculating how far the master could go with his poker before the burns began to destroy his body, and then had spent the afternoon calculating how high a pressure would split the bones in his lower legs. His only comfort had been that the leg-locks came in pairs – one for each leg – rather than binding his legs together. It was a small comfort.
Now, the knowledge that the master had only given him a relatively low dosage of torture on the previous day did not seem to help. All he could think of was what a higher dosage would feel like.
When he turned his head, he saw that the master’s gaze had slid down to his backside, and he felt his stomach lurch. The master moved forward and placed his hand firmly upon Elsdon’s buttocks, feeling them for a moment.
“Hmm,” he said. “I didn’t examine these as closely as I should have yesterday. Just turn your back to the light, please.”
Elsdon did so, feeling himself begin to shake again as the master’s fingers traced their way across the flesh there.
“I take back what I said about your training as a Seeker being a waste of time,” the master said. “This is quite impressive. Did you receive this all in one session, or over a period of time?”
“Over a period of time,” Elsdon whispered, closing his eyes against the feel of the master’s hands, tracing the runnels left by the striking of his father’s belt.
“I should have guessed. Well, my dear, I think you’re ready for the rack.”
He whirled around, unable to hide the dismay that streamed out from his heart. “I thought . . . I thought you proceeded slowly.”
“Normally I do. But normally I don’t have prisoners who chat with me while they’re being tortured. I’d begun to suspect that you were different from the others. Now I know why. You’ve been through prolonged torture before; none of this small fiddle-faddle I’ve been putting you through is likely to have any effect on you. No, my dear, I’m afraid I must skip the preliminaries and proceed to the harder part of your ordeal.”
Elsdon opened his mouth, but the master cut him off by saying, “My dear, when you reach the rack room and see the instruments there, you’ll realize that I’m continuing to be soft toward you; there are worse instruments I could use on you. Don’t be difficult, or you may tempt me to hang you from the pulley.”
Elsdon envisioned that, and felt a shudder run through him. He looked over in the direction of the outer wall of his cell. It was silent now.
The door squeaked as it opened. Looking over, he saw that the master was holding it wide open. “Come along, my dear,” the torturer said. “The King is awaiting your confession. We mustn’t dilly-dally.”
Elsdon looked past the master to the guards, who were both watching him. One looked amused, while the other was frankly running his eyes over Elsdon’s body.
Elsdon fought a sudden urge to hide his genitals with his hands. He asked, in
what he hoped was a dignified manner, “May I bring my blanket?”
The master smiled. “My dear, you have just asked whether you may cover your nakedness, rather than have me parade you stripped in front of dozens of strangers. Need I tell you the answer?”
Elsdon shook his head slowly. He said in a low voice, “Your answer is that I’m in the Hidden Dungeon.”
The master chuckled. “I suspected from the start that you were a quick learner.” And he held out his arm until Elsdon came forward.
o—o—o
The corridor of the Hidden Dungeon was warmer. It was also decorated like a palace.
They passed rooms where guards and torturers clustered, standing by man-high fireplaces that threw out light far brighter than the oil lamps bracketed to the walls. At first Elsdon thought that the gilded carvings upon the mantelpieces were his imagination. Then he began to pass tapestries, woven bright green and red and blue, depicting long-ago battles and strange beasts. Beyond the tapestried walls were pillars marking an arch over the corridor. As Elsdon passed through the arch, he saw that the pillars were delicately carved with capitals of oak leaves and acorns. The arch itself was painted with the night sky, each star carefully picked out in gold-leaf.
Elsdon, struggling to move forward with the help of the master’s strong arm around him, found himself wondering whether this was in fact the royal palace of Vovim. But the mother-of-pearl shelves under the chandelier near the arch held human skulls, and the door that they passed next – apparently a main door to the outside world – was flanked by men in the distinctive red uniform of the King’s soldiers, watching with narrowed eyes all who passed down the corridor, whether they be prisoner or torturer. Their bayonets were pointed outward, and they appeared prepared to bar the door against every inhabitant of this place.
This impression was confirmed as Elsdon and the master passed under another archway and found themselves witness to a small confrontation: at a second door leading to the outside world, one of the King’s soldiers had a boy pinned at bayonet-point to the opposite wall. From the satisfied look of the second soldier, Elsdon gathered that the boy had been caught trying to sneak out.
The master made a grumbling noise in his throat, then said to the soldier, in his usual mild manner, “That’s my apprentice. I’ll take care of this.”
The soldier glared at the master for a moment – apparently he was unaccustomed to taking orders from the inhabitants of the dungeon – but the master continued to stare blandly at him, and presently the soldier gave a sharp nod and released the boy.
The master promptly reached down, grasped the boy by his hair, and pulled both him and Elsdon beyond the next arch, past the sight of the soldiers. Then he released the boy and raised his hand.
The boy cringed back against the wall, but the master’s blow landed lightly on his head, producing no more than a surprised yelp from the boy. “Don’t try it again,” advised the torturer, “or I’ll tell your master.”
Relief shook across the boy’s face. He grinned and raced away. The master glanced at Elsdon and shrugged. “The High Master’s apprentice,” he explained. “I told you I’m soft.” Then he took a firmer grip on Elsdon and began to pull him stumbling forward again.
Elsdon found that he was craning his neck to see the wall-reliefs they were passing: quaint carvings of tiny mice running from cats with claws outstretched. After a while he looked over at the master, only to discover that the torturer was smiling at him. “Not quite what you’re used to, is it?” he said. “I’ve seen etchings of the Eternal Dungeon – all those plain, featureless walls. I’d go mad if I had to work in a place like that.”
“Are all the lesser prisons like this, then?” Elsdon asked breathlessly, trying to concentrate his mind on the master’s words rather than on the blades of pain rising through his legs. “I thought I’d read somewhere that the lesser prisons in Vovim were dungeons.”
The master snorted. “And I suppose you think we harvest our fields with scythes rather than combines. The lesser prisons stopped being housed in dungeons centuries ago. The old dungeons are all closed up; no Vovimian torturer works in such a place. Unlike the Seekers, who house themselves with the bats.” He gave another grin and then, without warning, kicked open a door.
The door kicked back, slamming into the master’s face. Cursing, the master propped Elsdon up against the doorpost – carved with knights doing battle with dragons for the sake of fair maidens – and pushed the door open more cautiously.
A hook, the size of a man’s head, swung forward, nearly stunning the master. The master roared and pushed aside the hook, opening the door wide. “That hell-bound apprentice of mine!” he said. “When will he learn to clean up after himself? He’ll be lucky if I don’t use this pulley on him when I see him next. Come inside,” he added to Elsdon, returning to his mild manner.
Elsdon took a last look at the corridor, but all that he could see was another heavily guarded door, with the King’s soldiers scrutinizing him carefully. Taking a deep breath, he limped inside the room.
The master closed the door with a heavy thud and waited till Elsdon was several steps inside before letting go of the great hook. It swung to and fro from the ceiling, its chains clinking. The master moved over to the side of the room, saying, “Thirteen years old, and he has the brains of a three-year-old. If the High Master walked in and smashed his face on the pulley, that boy would be on the rack before suppertime. But no, because he has me to scold him, he pays no heed. . . .”
As he spoke, the master walked over to the side of the room. Lifting a weight from the ground, he placed it on a stack holding similar weights, which were attached to the chain. The hook immediately rose into the air, pulled back by the counterweights, as the master continued to grumble.
Elsdon barely noticed. He was standing motionless, staring at the great, iron table that sparkled under lamplight in the middle of the room.
“. . . should throw him back on the streets, where he belongs, and let him fight the rats for his food. I ought to know better than to choose my apprentices on the basis of their earnest expressions rather than— Ah.” The master had caught sight of Elsdon finally. Coming over to stand by Elsdon, he said softly, “Well?”
“Sweet blood,” whispered Elsdon. “Sweet, sweet blood.”
The master smiled. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she? We call her the Butterfly.”
Elsdon walked slowly forward, the pain in his legs forgotten. It had taken a moment for his mind to take in the fact that this was a rack, for it was shaped like no rack he had ever seen. Whereas Yclau racks were a simple rectangle, with the straps at the head and bottom of the rack bed, this rack consisted of two equal-sided triangles that overlapped at their points. Where the points overlapped was a short, narrow rectangle – the body of the butterfly.
The rack was all of iron, but it was not smooth iron. The face of the iron had been turned into a relief of a butterfly: the triangles were delicately feathered like wings, while the narrow rectangle was molded into the shape, not of a butterfly’s body, but of a woman, bare-breasted, with only a wisp of cloth to hide her genitals. Her arms were raised to form the far edge of the wings, and her legs were likewise spread wide.
Elsdon reached out and touched the iron, running his fingers over the delicate pattern of the feathers. “Are they all like this?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“Vovimian racks? Oh, each one is different. This is a land of artists, my dear. We have more of them than we know what to do with, and an artist who obtains a commission to decorate a prison considers himself a lucky man. Racks are the oldest form of Vovimian prison decoration; this one is four centuries old, though it has been re-incised every few decades and its machinery updated.”
“Not uncultured,” murmured Elsdon. “That’s what the High Seeker said about Vovim.”
“It’s good of him to remember.” The master’s voice was dry. “As a boy, Layle had a passion for the arts: theater-goings, etchings, lit
erature . . . I always wondered how he could bear to live in a place like Yclau. Mind you, you produce decent machinery,” the master added politely. “We import our locking mechanisms from Yclau.”
Elsdon moved forward to look. The wheel was the only part of the rack that resembled that which he knew. Though it was made of iron and incised with curling lines, it was much the same size and shape as the wheel of an Yclau rack. It was placed on one side of the rack rather than at the head, and Elsdon bent over it to look at the controls below. Yes, there was the same rust-red locking mechanism, though it was attached, not to one wheel control, but to four.
He looked up at the master, who was hovering nearby. “The four straps can be separately operated?”
The master nodded. “If desired. It’s sometimes helpful to strap the torso down and keep one set of limbs loose, so that the prisoner can realize fully how much he has been stretched. If he— What are you doing?” The master’s voice turned sharp as Elsdon ducked down.
Elsdon’s voice emerged hollow from underneath the rack. “It’s a maze down here! How does this all work?”
Half an hour later, Elsdon was still sitting under the rack, his legs folded within his arms, listening as the master traced aloud the gears and weights, far beyond the complexity of any Yclau rack. His bottom had grown cold. Unlike in Yclau, the racks here were not hollow at the base; rather, they rested on a solid iron foundation, and the workings were placed between the foundation and the groin-high bed. Elsdon had slid down in order to keep his head from bumping against the bed above. The master was more comfortably seated outside the rack, on the neatly-swept stone floor.
“Well, my dear,” he said, as Elsdon gathered breath to ask another question, “I have no doubts now that you’re Layle’s journeyman.”
“What do you mean?” asked Elsdon. His eye was on the head of the butterfly, which he could see from its back, and he was thinking that he should ask the master why the head was hinged.
“It’s been twenty years – no, twenty-one – since I last had a conversation like this. Enjoyable as it is to relive old days, though, I think it’s time that we proceeded to the next stage. I trust that you share Layle’s talent for asking questions between your screams.”
Elsdon’s chest grew suddenly tight. He allowed the master to pull him out from under the rack and onto his feet, but when the torturer gestured toward the bed of the rack, Elsdon said, “Look, you don’t— You needn’t—”
The master sighed. “Do you want me to call the guards to hold you down?” he asked gently.
Elsdon bit his lip and shook his head. He took a breath, and then another breath, and then he pulled himself up onto the rack.
The iron was cold against his skin. He lay down carefully upon the naked butterfly-woman, spreading his arms in imitation of her gesture. So far successful. He should think about the butterfly – think of it flying free in the air.
He felt the strap touch his wrist and flinched away. The master’s hand grasped his wrist immediately, dragging it back into place. “Don’t be difficult, my dear,” the master said. “The more you struggle, the harder I’m going to have to tighten these at the start.”
The chain holding the strap was still loose. He tried to remember that. He was lying in bed, wearing some rather odd shirt-cuffs – no, he was flying free in the air . . .
The master finished binding the fourth strap around his left ankle; none of the straps were cushioned, as they would have been in Yclau. Before Elsdon had time to decide whether this made matters better or worse, he heard the familiar clink of the wheel turning past the initial notch. At once, the strap-chains went taut.
He screamed.
He managed to swallow the scream into light sobs and heavy pants. Next to him the master said, “Well, that’s a gratifying response. I was beginning to think that there wasn’t any instrument here that could frighten you. Now, then . . . No, wait. My head is wandered off to pasture this morning; I’ve skipped a step.” He moved back to the head of the rack, and a moment later a piece of cloth fell over Elsdon’s eyes, cutting off light.
Elsdon’s sobs deepened. “Sweet blood,” he said in a choked voice. “Sweet, sweet blood.”
The master chuckled lightly as he finished tying the blindfold. “You’d be better off praying to the torture-god; he’s the one most likely to hear you in this place. Now, I think we’ll start you at level eight.”
“Why eight?” Elsdon asked through teeth that were beginning to chatter.
“No particular reason. It’s my favorite number.”
There was a whirring sound, and then Elsdon could not breathe. His chest refused to rise – something was holding it down, the same thing that was wrenching his arms and legs out of their sockets. He opened his mouth in an attempt to scream, and then became aware that the feel of the straps had lessened. He was at so high a level now that his wrists and ankles were beginning to numb. A little bit higher, and he wouldn’t be able to feel the bindings at all. Just a little bit higher . . .
“Excuse me?” The master spoke close to Elsdon’s ear. The torturer had evidently leaned over the rack. “Did I hear you say that you want me to take you higher?”
Elsdon made no reply. He was still trying to figure out the trick to making his chest rise. “I wonder,” said the master in a musing voice. Then, with terrifying suddenness, the wheel whirled again, the chains grew less taut, and Elsdon could feel the full force of the bindings.
He could not stop his screams this time. The best he could do was turn them into high-pitched moans. “Interesting,” the master said above him. “Why do I have the feeling that if I took you off the rack and bound you hand-to-foot, I’d get the same effect?”
“I’ll tell you anything,” Elsdon sobbed. “Anything at all.”
“Of course you will, my dear – just hold that thought. There’s another duty left for me to do.”
Elsdon heard him step to the head of the rack again. There was a click, and then Elsdon’s head was yanked back, falling as the hinged head of the butterfly-woman was released backwards. He was left barely able to swallow or breathe, with his face pointed straight back.
He heard the rustle of cloth, and all his sobs were stilled momentarily by a great silence that seemed to extend through his whole body. He said, in a toneless voice, “You’re going to rape me.”
“How clever of you to guess, my dear; most of my prisoners aren’t as quick-witted as you. . . . But I forgot. You were trained by Layle.”
“Yes,” said Elsdon. “He trained me for this.” And then the rest of his words were swallowed by a scream that never emerged from his throat, for in the next moment his mouth was stopped up.
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